David Ford is Professor of Health Informatics and leads the Health Informatics Group at College of Medicine in Swansea University, Wales, UK.

David is Director of the Administrative Data Research Centre (ADRC) Wales, an £8 million investment by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of its Big Data initiative and is Deputy Director of a the Centre for Improvement in Population Health through E-records Research (CIPHER), part of the Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research, funded by a consortium of top UK research funders led by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

David is also Director of the eHealth Industries Innovation (ehi2) Centre, developing links between academia, the NHS, and business within the UK and internationally. He is also University Director of NHS Wales Informatics Research Laboratories, created through a collaboration between the College of Medicine, Swansea University and NHS Wales Informatics Service, the national programme for NHS IT for Wales. The Research Laboratories provide state-of-the-art facilities to design, prototype, test and evaluate innovative new information technologies for use in improving health and healthcare.

David is joint lead of the Health Information Research Unit for Wales (HIRU), which develops new ways of harnessing the potential of routinely collected information collected in health and other settings. HIRU’s main product is the SAIL Databank, an internationally recognised data linkage resource formed from a wide variety of routinely collected data from across Wales.

David is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) and past Chairman and a current Director of MediWales, a membership organisation representing the medical technology sector of Wales.

David is a member of numerous committees and national bodies relating to health informatics and health-related research. He has received research grants and consultancy contracts valuing over £35m over recent years.

Jones, Kerina H..,Laurie, Graeme.,Stevens, Leslie.,Dobbs, Christine.,Ford, David V.. & Lea, Nathan. (2017). The other side of the coin: Harm due to the non-use of health-related data. International Journal of Medical Informatics 97, 43-51.

Baker, D.,Anandhakrishnan, A.,Tuite-Dalton, K.,Lockart–Jones, H.,Middleton, R.,Ford, D.,Crowe, C. & Giovannoni, G. (2016). How to refer to people with disease in research outputs: The disconnection between academic practise and that preferred by people with multiple sclerosis. 10, 127-133.

PMIM301Using Secondary Health Data

Students will study data quality and management, secondary uses of clinical data, service improvement and clinical audit. Academic skills are developed and enhanced by an introduction to quantitative research methodologies. Students will be introduced to statistical software such as SPSS.